Representation and distribution of real time traffic information may be data intensive. Mobile navigation devices (e.g., car or personal navigation devices) may not be connected to or in communication with a network for real time traffic updates. In other cases, the mobile navigation device may be bandwidth constrained. For example, the mobile navigation device may only be able to receive and/or transmit up to a few kilobytes per second.
Current techniques designed to transmit traffic information to a mobile navigation device having bandwidth constraints include radio data system-traffic message channel (RDS-TMC) based location referencing, Agora-C map based location referencing, or transport protocol experts group (TPEG) methods. For example, a RDS-TMC or HD radio system may use an AM or FM radio signal to send highly compressed bit streams of traffic data to a car or personal navigation system. Unfortunately, these current standards and techniques involve “coding up” as many of the road segments as possible in terms of predefined identifications or using latitude/longitude based representations. Therefore, there is a continuing effort to provide improved systems and methods for providing traffic data for a navigation system in a limited bandwidth environment.